Newmarket office has option for residential conversion

Harcourts is leaseback selling its national head office at 7-9 Alpers Ave in Newmarket.

A new lease is designed to give investors or developers plenty of time to file plans for the two-storey building, which could include apartment conversion.

The real-estate agency has occupied the 956sq m property for 10 years but it is now too small, and the company is looking to move to larger premises closer to the centre of Newmarket.

From the time of sale, the property will return a net annual rental income of $300,000 from Harcourts to its buyer on a three-year leaseback term with a lease-termination clause.

Marketing agent Nick Wevers, of NAI Harcourts' Viaduct office, is marketing the Alpers Ave property for sale by tenders closing on April 4, in conjunction with colleague Ranjan Unka and Tim Turner of Harcourts Cooper and Co Real Estate.

Wevers says the L-shaped building, sitting on a 1475sq m site, was built in 1983 and substantially refurbished in 2005-07.

The property would be ideal for an owner-occupier wanting a location easy to get to from other parts of Auckland, or a developer interested in the residential conversion. "Alpers Ave is literally minutes to the State Highway 1 motorway on-ramps."

The property is set among a number of motels in Alpers Ave and has the same Residential 7A zoning.

"While the site would be ideal for apartments, it would work just as well for another office tenant, having 26 on-site parking spaces, eight of them covered," Wevers says.

"It has worked very well for Harcourts because it has been very accessible to the company's offices around the city. It's very close to Newmarket, which is a transport hub for other parts of the greater Auckland area as well as the CBD.

"[The building] has been very well maintained and has a high standard of fitout and air-conditioning throughout," says Wever.

The ground floor has a tiled entrance lobby and a lift. The air-conditioned floor has been partitioned into an auction room, a general office area, nine offices and toilets. Upstairs, the first floor contains a reception area, 12 offices, a training room, store rooms and more staff amenities such as toilets and two lunch rooms.

The building has been seismically assessed as exceeding 67 per cent of the new earthquake building standard, and the New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering has graded it A-plus.